82 STEPPES AND DESERTS. 



like yellow clouds. In the summer the heat is exceedingly great, 

 and in winter there is here, as at Turfan, neither severe cold nor 

 heavy snow." The district round Khotan, Kashgar, and Yarkand, 

 still pays its tribute in home-grown cotton as it did in the time of 

 Marco Polo. (II Milione di Marco Polo, pubbl. dal Conte Baldelli, 

 t. i. pp. 32 and 87.) In the Oasis of Hami (Khamil), above 200 

 miles east of Aksu, orange trees, pomegranates, and vines, whose 

 fruit is of a superior quality, grow and nourish. 



The products of cultivation which are thus noticed imply the 

 existence of only a small degree of elevation, and that over extensive 

 districts. At so great a distance from any coast, and in those 

 easterly meridians where the cold of winter is known to exceed that 

 of corresponding latitudes nearer our own part of the world, a 

 plateau which should be as high as Madrid or Munich might indeed 

 have very hot summers, but would hardly have, in 43 and 44 

 latitude, extremely mild winters with scarcely any snow. Near the 

 Caspian, 83 English feet below the level of the Black Sea, at 

 Astrachan, in 46 21' lat., I saw the cultivation of the vine greatly 

 favored by a high degree of summer heat; but the winter cold is 

 there from 20 to 25 Cent. ( 4 to 13 Fahr.) It is 

 therefore necessary to protect the vines after November, by sinking 

 them deep in the earth. Plants which live, as we may say, only in 

 the summer, as the vine, the cotton bush, rice, and melons, may 

 indeed be cultivated with success between the latitudes of 40 and 

 44 on plains of more than 500 toises (3197 English feet) eleva- 

 tion, being favored by the powerful radiant heat ; but how could the 

 pomegranate trees of Aksu, and the orange trees of Hami, whose 

 fruit Pere Grosier extolled as distinguished for its goodness, bear the 

 cold of the long and jsevere winter which would be the necessary 

 consequence of a considerable elevation of the land ? (Asie Centrale, 

 t. ii. pp. 48-52, and 429.) Carl Zimmerman (in the learned Ana- 

 lysis of his " Karte von Inner Asien," 1841, s. 99) has made it 

 appear extremely probable that the Tarim depression, i. e., the 

 desert between the mountain chains of the Thian-schan and the 

 Kuen-liin, where the Steppe river Tarim-gol empties itself into the 

 Lake of Lop, which used to be described as an alpine lake, is hardly 

 1200 (1279 English) feet above the level of the sea, or only twice 





